Yeah, basically. At this point, I've been brainwashed to believe that no one has any Independent thought and everyone is brainwashed. Just as you've been brainwashed to think contrary.

The problem is, brainwashing is nay impossible to reverse or change, so there's little to no point to try and convince an adult of anything that is outside the range of their own brainwashing.

My reasoning behind atheism being the lesser evil is that it simply doesn't stand in the way of science, which cures illness and promotes longevity. But again, that's just what I've been brainwashed to think, and I'm sure you've been brainwashed to think something else, so any discussion is more or less pointless.

Science also produces everything from small firearms to nuclear weaponry, IEDs to white phosphorescence, hand grenades to tanks; science killed 5,000,000 people in two days. Science has caused the global warming crises. Really, most of the problems we rely on science to solve were caused by science; moreover, throughout the most of history religion has contributed to science.

The medieval Catholic Church published scientific reports arguing that the earth was round and estimated its approximate mass with startling accuracy using Greek mathematical outlines. It was Muslim scholars who gave us algebra, our current number system, and revived the science found by Greek polytheists.

Really there have only been two major conflicts with religion and science. The first was when Galileo, himself inspired by religion, argued that the sun was the center of the solar system. He actually got permission from the church to conduct and publish his research as a theory, and was really only arrested because his portrayal as the pope (who’d been the one to give him permission to do the research and release it,) as a fool. The second came with the Origen of Species, and in both cases science continued to advance itself regardless of religious fundamentalism.

There are smaller cases. Some Muslims take the Qur’an literally when it says the earth is flat like an Ostrich nest. There’s also the whole creationism thing, but both of these are really smaller problems than people make them out to be and either way they’re not making a difference.

On the flip side nations like Saudi Arabia, in acknowledgement of Islamic law, give as much as 15% of the GDP to international foreign aid. Now, America spends about 3-4% of its GDP on its military, and that’s about 50% of the military spending in the world. Imagine we multiplied our military spending five times over and started giving it to victims of disasters all around the world. I rather think the world would benefit, and I’m not even a Muslim.

On the other hand during the French Revolution Christian scholars contributing to science, math, and medicine as well as providing valuable community service were slaughtered in the name of ‘lady logic,’ and a secular future. In North Korea Christians, Muslims, Jews, and religious people of all kinds are being crucified, tortured, and wrongly imprisoned for life because the North Korean communist regime agrees with you that religion hampers politics and that atheism is a less evil.

But again, how can really be sure anything you're thinking has not been drilled into you by indoctrination. That's the thing about being indoctrinated is that indoctrinated people don't know they're indoctrinated.

The only way to have someone not be totally brainwashed by early ideas would be to raise them with no human contact or access to any outside ideas. I believe the closest thing to that would be the "feral Children" you hear about.

Lastly, reasoning is not pointless as it can be used to help people resolve things within their own brainwashing, which may sound a little absurd. For example, I have been brainwashed to think that I need food to live. If I start to question this (which I would only do because I have been brainwashed into thinking that questioning things is an important way to learn) I would use reasoning to figure out if I did or did not in fact need food to live.

Once again, that's not brainwashing. Yes there are many things hinted to us through society, though it is not brainwashing. For brainwashing is a system of psychological and social influences on an environment for a purpose. It is meant to manipulate and control ideas into another. You see, what we know, how we know, and why we know can be distinguised from negative social influence efforts because these extreme propaganda are like a totalistic scope and their sequenced phases are aimed at destabilizing participants' sense of self, sense of reality, and values.

And Feral Children are irrelevant to what we are discussing here because the majority of them were grown up without human knowledge or languages deeming their intellect to that of an animal, which they also could have been raised by.